How to Improve Your WordPress Website for Mobile-Friendly

Sep 22, 2022

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SEO or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an essential part of every digital marketing campaign. A solid SEO method improves the visibility of websites by helping you rank higher in search results.

A higher rank means more visitors and opportunities to monetize your business.

Today, mobile phones generate over half of all website visits worldwide. Therefore, making sure your WordPress site is mobile-friendly is essential, along with mobile SEO.

In this piece we'll explain what mobile SEO is as well as the advantages of optimizing website content to provide more enjoyable mobile browsing.

After that, we'll guide you through the 6 actions to optimize your WordPress website and place your membership business at the fingertips of all mobile users!

What is Mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO works as it sounds, enhancing your web content for devices that are mobile, such as smartphones and tablets. Its goal is to improve the experience for mobile users and increase your website's visibility in search results pages (SERPs).

Why is SEO Optimization Important for Mobile? (+ Benefits)

As we mentioned earlier, mobile traffic now accounts for 54.4% of search engine traffic. With the average user spending more than 6 hours on their phone every day, it's enough time to have your company appear on their screens all day long.

Making an effort to reduce those screen hours can lead to other benefits for example:

  • More Impressions. Mobile searches gain a massive 85.8 percent more visits over desktop websites. Therefore, businesses who provide seamless mobile user experience can improve brand visibility and increase the sales.
  • Enhance the Dwell time. Dwell time is how long a user spends on your site. When they have their phone at hand, with nothing else to accomplish, mobile users may explore your site for hours.
  • The HTML0 Boost Voice Google. Voice search lets users search for information by voice instead of typing (think Alexa from Amazon or Apple's Alexa and Siri from Apple). Siri). A majority of searches using voice are performed on phones - around 85% actually.

Mobile optimization SEO keeps you in line with Google's mobile-first index which is a favoritism for mobile-friendly sites.

Google's Mobile-First Index

Before, Google used a mixture of desktop and mobile site versions of its indexing system to rank content on SERPs. Desktop users got desktop results and mobile users got mobile results.

In the present, Google only uses the mobile version for indexing, so desktop searches return results for mobile devices too. This means your mobile and desktop sites should have the same data and metadata.

Find out more about Google's Mobile-First Index through Semrush >More

More importantly, businesses that fail to implement mobile optimization SEO may end up on the lowest of the search engine results.

How to Improve Your WordPress Website to be Mobile-Friendly Mobile SEO

If you want to make your site more optimized for mobile SEO You should follow the steps listed below:

1. Find out how mobile-friendly your site Is

An easy and quick way to see whether your website is mobile-friendly is to open your website via a phone. Additionally, there are several tools that can assist you in testing more mobile accessibility features.

Google Search Console is one of these instruments. With it, you can find out more information using:

  • Mobile-Friendly Test: Paste your web address's URL (or code fragment) to the Google search box and press "Test URL". In a short time you'll see the way your website looks when viewed on mobile devices, as well as a list of any mobile usability problems.
  • Mobile Usability report: Details how many bugs there are, which sort they are, and what pages are affected.
  • Crawl Stats Report:This report is targeted at advanced internet users with websites that have more than one thousand pages. This report will provide statistics regarding the history of Google's crawling and also any problems that are that are found on your site.

2. Perform a Technical SEO Inspection

After that, it is time to conduct an SEO technical inspection to check your website's software, services, and files.

In order to improve performance and speed You should do the following:

  • Use structured data and schema tags in order to assist Google determine what's happening on your page.
  • Utilize internal hyperlinks to improve keyword rankings as well as page's visibility.
  • Compress website code and remove non-essential code snippets.
  • Use headings like the following: h1, h2, h3 to structure your text.

3. Improve Mobile Site Loading Times

Improving mobile page load speed is an essential aspect in mobile SEO. Google uses page loading time as a ranking factor consequently, sites with slower load times rank less.

Plus, 88.5% of webmasters say that slow website speed is one of the primary reasons why users leave a website. If lots of people leave your website, this also impacts your rank.

The ideal mobile page speed ought to be in the range of 0.5 and two seconds. To check your website speed, you can use Google's PageSpeed Insights.

PageSpeed provides suggestions to speed up loading time. Examples include compressing images, using browser caching, and getting rid of unnecessary pop-ups or extensions.

4. Optimize mobile user experience

Alongside the speedy loading speed, elements on websites such as design, navigation, responsiveness, readability, and pop-ups can also influence the experience of mobile users.

Design

84.6 96% of web designers say that a cluttered web page design is the most common mistake businesses make. The design of mobiles should be minimal with the goal of maximizing accessibility to content.

61.5 95% of designers claim that poorly-designed navigation is a major reason that visitors abandon an online site. It is therefore essential to do it right by implementing easy design elements such as:

  • The buttons and menus must be proportional to a device's screen size.
  • Avoid intermediate pages and other unnecessary steps.

The Hamburger Menus () are very popular as they leave your pages uncluttered and make it easy for your visitors to use your site.

Receptivity

73.1 A majority of web designers believe that a non-responsive web design setup is the most common reason for visitors to abandon a website.

A responsive web design improves the user's experience and dwell time.

Readability

You also need to ensure you can read your mobile website's content. In the end, users on mobile do not want to waste the time zooming in and out in order to view your site. So you should:

  • Be sure to keep paragraphs brief.
  • Use clear, large fonts (around 14px-16px).
  • Maximize the contrast between the text and the background.

Pop-ups

Google lets you use the following pop-ups:

  • Cookies, age or a legal proof.
  • Sign-in or registration boxes.
  • Pop-ups are quick to remove.

So, if you want to advertise your great business-oriented phone plans ensure that you follow Google's pop-up rules. If you don't, your rank may be affected.

Also, you must make your website mobile-friendly searches. This includes local searches and voice searches.

Local Searches

The major component of the mobile-based search revolution is local search. In fact, more than one-third of Internet users look for local businesses multiple times per week.

  • Signing up on Google My Business and filling out the contact information, URL, and other information.
  • Designing a content strategy to target the local market.
  • Your business should be listed in local directories.

Voice Searches

Searching for information via voice is now one of the fastest-growing kinds of search. In order to reap the benefits of it one must perform voice search optimization including:

  • Include Long-tail keyword as well as phrases.
  • Write answers to common questions, like deals or upcoming occasions.
  • Answers should be approximately 29 words long (the standard for voice search results).

6. Optimize content for mobile

For optimalizing your strategy of content creation for mobiledevices, be following regular SEO best practices, including:

  • Writing clickable headlines and descriptions.
  • Include backlinks as well as editorial links to boost your domain's credibility.
  • Ranking for popular and long-tail search terms.
  • Write in-depth articles on popular topics.
  • Inspiring people to share their content by including social media buttons.

The Title Tags as well as the Descriptions

Also, you should improve mobile-friendly content by using titles and meta descriptions. These help users find appropriate material. Mobile searches show less information than desktop searches. Therefore, it's important to add important details as well as keywords in the first place.

Keyword Research

Keywords for mobile content may be different from those used on desktops, therefore you need to conduct separate research on keywords for mobile content.

Takeaway

Mobile optimization SEO can bring visitors from mobile devices to your site and increases the ranking of your website on search engines. This is crucial for websites and content creators who want to cash in on their visitors.

To optimize your WordPress site to be mobile-friendly it is essential to take the right web design choices to improve the user experience on mobile devices.

You should also optimize content for mobile, cater to voice search on mobile and mobile search, and improve your website loading speed.

All-in-all, to succeed in the age of smartphones, your website must be mobile-friendly.

Do you have any additional questions about how you can make your site mobile-friendly? Post them in the comment area below.